The present invention relates to virtual models, in particular to a method of generating a virtual model of an object, a virtual model of an object and a virtual model of an object embodied on a record medium.
The modeling of realistic virtual human models is of importance to both research and industrial communities. Realistic modeling of individual human characters is essential for advanced multimedia, augmented reality, teleconferencing, and situation planning for plastic surgery or even a hair cut.
Early efforts in the area of virtual human models focused on interpolation techniques that modeled a body as a set of simple shapes, and using physical laws to dynamically model the motions of the body. However, common motions such as walking are too complex to calculate in this manner.
Problems in this regard led to methods being based on anatomical know-how. A human body is a collection of complex rigid and non-rigid components, such as skeleton, muscles, skin, and hair. Of these, the musculature has attracted a lot of attention because it is the most complex anatomical system that determines the surface form.
Muscles typically consist of different kinds of tissue, allowing some parts to be contracted and others not. Depending on their state of contraction, muscles have different shapes and thus, they influence the surface form in different ways.
Thus, anatomical models have been constructed, which typically involve a biomechanical model to represent muscle deformation. These methods provide an accurate representation of the major structures of the body, but take up a lot of computational power, which means ability to animate the models in real time is compromised.
As a way of overcoming these limitations, an example based method has been proposed, in which a model of some body parts in different poses with the same underlying mesh is generated. One example based method would be to construct the shape of a specific person by mapping 2D photographs onto a generic 3D model.
More recent attempts along these lines have focused on constructing a skeleton and aligning this with a set of captured poses, and linking polygonal models to the skeleton. This method is implemented by observing the positions of markers captured during initial scanning of the object. The main drawback of this technique is that a large number of markers are needed to produce an accurate model, and shape manipulation of body parts in the sense of muscle deformation is not possible.
Efforts have also been made to model humans by representing the variation of shape and texture, in which new configurations of an object can be modeled by forming linear combinations of a number of prototypes.
Thus, there is a need to create realistic virtual human models in a way that is less time consuming and computationally expensive than methods using currently available technologies. Furthermore, there is a need for the creation of realistic virtual human models that can be used with interactive applications, particularly where it is required to animate or modify the model in real time.